“Kanye’s been watching [my] stuff for a while,” Ali Akbar, a former Tea Party operative-turned-MAGA pundit, told me with glee over the weekend, referring to the sudden emergence of Kanye West as a conservative-media celebrity. A month ago, the idea would have seemed absurd: Akbar, who frequently reminds his viewers that he’s black and Arab, is best known for producing videos with far-right conspiracists like Mike Cernovich and Lucian Wintrich, and his lengthy philosophical rants, which he live-streams with the use of an iPad in his home office. Last week, however, amid a stream of pro-Trump tweets, the legendary rapper and cultural behemoth shared two of Akbar’s videos. West’s liberal fans wondered if he was having a public breakdown, or was merely misinformed. The right hailed him as cause célèbre.

West, of course, has been linked to Donald Trump before. During his Saint Pablo Tour in 2016, he said he “would’ve voted for Trump,” and he later posed for a photo with the president-elect in Trump Tower. But his renewed enthusiasm in recent days for Making America Great Again—retweeting figures like Akbar and Candace Owens, publicizing his debates with John Legend and T.I., and declaring that he and the president are brothers who share “dragon energy”—nevertheless caught the wider world off guard. Akbar, who claims West began watching his content in October after someone sent it to him, was less surprised. According to sources I spoke to, West is a fan of Jordan Peterson, the controversial Canadian professor who has attracted a cult following of disaffected young men, and whose self-help philosophy has become something of a gateway drug for those flirting with the far right. (West himself has hinted at this affiliation, tweeting a video of a TMZ page with a Peterson video in an open tab.) Earlier this week, he had lunch with the leadership of Turning Points USA, the conservative nonprofit best known for maintaining a “watch list” of university professors who “discriminate against conservative students.”

The red-pilling of Kanye West marks a turning point for the conservative-media universe, which has undergone a revolution in the months and years since Trumpism took over Republican politics. In that time, the movement formerly known as the alt-right has splintered: trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos have flamed out; white nationalists like Richard Spencer have failed to go mainstream; rabid conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones remain a sideshow; the vanguard of the populist-nationalist movement, Breitbart News, and its former chairman, Steve Bannon, have fallen out of favor. Instead, the dragon energy in the far right has been supplanted by a nebulous “intellectual dark web” comprised of right-wing pundits, agnostic comedian podcasters, self-help gurus, and disgruntled ex-liberals united by their desire to “red pill” new adherents—breaking the spell of political correctness, as Neo’s eyes are opened in The Matrix. For those hoping to rebrand as iconoclasts, rather than Breitbartian race realists, recruiting West was the shot in the arm they needed.

The anti-identity politics premise is potentially an appealing one for a certain brand of self-made superstar, and nobody’s eyes are now open as wide as Kanye West’s. “Everyone who I’ve talked to who’s very familiar with the situation around him right now says that he’s super creative. He’s in his own world, but he’s super strategic,” Akbar said. “I hear he’s never been happier which makes me really sad—these liberals online [saying] he’s mentally incapacitated? I’m like, this is so sad that you could praise Michael Jackson or Prince or Steve Jobs and Kanye can’t get a little bit of that respect.” Indeed, with the left in meltdown, the right has been overcompensating to show their appreciation. Donald Trump Jr. has been among the most high-profile Trumpists going to bat for West on Twitter, and nearly all of my conservative sources are suddenly obsessed with his discography. “I take it all back rap is great now,” conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted last week, reveling in the absurdity of the reversal. He also issued a note of caution to any new right-wing fans: “Just warning you now: live by the Kanye, die by the Kanye.”

When I caught up with him this week, Shapiro said he didn’t know whether West had discovered his own podcasts or writing, but given West’s enthusiastic insinuation into the conservative-media world, he wouldn’t be surprised. Still, he suggested, there’s no real evidence of West’s conservatism, in the traditional sense, beyond the philosophical mind-meld of two reality-TV narcissists who refuse to conform to expectations. “I don’t know what would make Kanye conservative, other than he’s not into the identity politics and he likes Trump.”

As West himself wrote last week, he hasn’t “done enough research on conservatives” to call himself one. But in a cultural landscape where nothing is more radioactive than Trumpism, crossing the picket line is a little bit punk rock—even if it’s mostly meaningless. “I think part of what’s telling about Kanye’s recent embrace of Trump and Internet Trumpism is that it’s very vaporous in terms of what it actually means,” said Will Sommer, author of Right Richter, a weekly newsletter that tracks conservative media. “The videos he’s retweeting and the things that he’s tweeting is just a lot of vague talk about expanding your mind and not caring about social convention and stuff. That’s already kind of like [what] Kanye has been talking about in interviews for years and years and years.”

West seemed to make the point himself in a TMZ interview Tuesday, in which he declared that he wears a Trump hat “because it’s a thing you’re not supposed to do.” Still, at a time when conservatives control Washington but are reviled in Hollywood, that counts for a lot. “The big thing with a lot of your far-right Internet personalities is that they subscribe to the Breitbrat formulation of politics being downstream from culture,” explained Sommer. “With Kanye, they see this as a sign of their growing power and relevance and also as a tool to win over—or as Candace Owens puts it—‘red-pill’ more people.”

The new right-wing digital rabbit hole is designed for precisely the sort of self-radicalization that has turned Kanye West, in the space of a few months or years, from the anti-establishment rapper who famously said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” to the anti-establishmentarian who recently rapped, “All blacks gotta be Democrats? Man, we ain’t made it off the plantation.” What sets this new strain of right-wing thought apart is its palatability: it may contain many of the same toxic sentiments that made Breitbart a four-letter word in some corners of the media, but it’s less partisan and more positive psychology. The conservatism of Jordan Peterson isn’t about Republicanism, it’s about self-reliance. Sam Harris doesn’t preach Islamophobia or race realism, he advocates moral objectivism and academic freedom to discuss genetic differences in intelligence. Owens’s criticism of black victimhood is dressed up as a celebration of self-realization.

While onetime giants in the conservative-media sphere struggle to stay afloat—Breitbart is fighting to remain financially stable, let alone culturally relevant; part of Yiannopoulos’s multi-million-dollar start-up venture, Milo Worldwide LLC, collapsed last week; RedState, once a prominent conservative blog, recently fired several writers and editors; and I.J.R. has repeatedly slashed both its staff and budget—the new thought leaders of the right are eschewing news outlets entirely. The trend toward conservative influencers has also given a boost to Prager University, a massive media platform that pumps out slickly produced explainer-type videos by firebrands like former Google engineer James Damore, pro-Trump sheriff David Clarke, publishing exec Steve Forbes, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, and National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, all of which somehow manage to coexist. According to Buzzfeed, PragerU, as it’s known, is on track to hit a billion page views in 2018.

What unifies these disparate voices, my sources tell me, is a sense that P.C. politics are fundamentally divisive and restrictive. “If the left is so narrowly defined itself that identity politics and hating Trump are its two main criteria, you’re going to find a lot people who, mainly at the identity-politics front, they’re going to say, ‘Well, hold on a second,’” Shapiro said. “I have lots of fans from all over the spectrum [saying], ‘I made it on the basis of my capacity and my grit and my hard work, not on the basis of my skin color. If you’re gonna boil me down to whatever it is you think I am based on my group identity, well, go to hell.’” Those outside the group have picked up on the same thread. “It’s not, ‘Oh, Kanye is [saying] socialism sucks. Kanye is realizing Democrats are the real racists.’ I mean, Jesus Christ. These people are killing me,” Cernovich said, dismissing the idea that West had become a Republican, and noting how West had recently tweeted support for his “hero,” Parkland survivor and gun-control advocate Emma González. “He’s trying to be himself.”

Even as those on the right have lauded West for his bravery, a corresponding backlash has bubbled up on the left. Many of West’s colleagues in the music industry have publicly denounced his politics, spawning a thousand think pieces lamenting the fall of a pop-culture czar. The response, said Shapiro, illustrates why stars like West are hesitant to leave the closet. “There’s no question that . . . working in an industry like Hollywood, [the] music industry, that if you are interested, even at the mildest, in conservative thought or libertarian thought, you keep it under wraps,” he said. Not all are so pessimistic: Akbar predicted that West’s embrace of the new intellectual right will set a precedent. “The current form of the social-justice warrior, Black Lives Matter, Women’s March thing is so wildly unpopular with the Leftists I talk to,” he said, estimating that at least a dozen A-listers would soon join West’s ranks. “We’re gonna have a fun spring, and even more fun summer.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to remove the term “far right” from a sentence listing columnists and influencers from across the conservative spectrum.